"My Mad Fat Diary" Is Peak Britpop Revival, and Must-See TV

The goddess Britannia has been dead for the better part of a decade by the time we glimpse her reanimated corpse in Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s cult-classic comic book Phonogram: Rue Britannia. The embodiment of '90s Britpop, this deceased deity in a Union Jack baby tee has become the fixation of a cadre of “Retromancers”—fans plotting to recapture their lost youth by bringing her back. If they succeed, Britannia will wander the earth zombie-like, distorting cultural memories of Britpop and poisoning younger generations with nostalgia.

Now a decade since Rue Britannia’s 2006 debut, it seems impossible that Britpop nostalgia could have been prevalent and destructive enough by that time to demand such an elegant critique. It really was, though. By the early aughts, the movement had been reduced to a few bands making the worst albums of their careers and a smattering of “Britpop dance nights” where American twenty-somethings could ritually cosplay an era they missed by half a decade and a few thousand miles. In retrospect, that period looks more like a Britpop hangover than a Britpop revival—but in 2016, Britannia’s moment in the 20-year nostalgia cycle truly has arrived.

Sure enough, the past year has brought new albums from two bands whose reunions once seemed impossible: Blur and Suede. In the last month alone, America has seen a new Britpop Invasion across various forms of media: Lush put out their first new music since 1996 in the midst of a North American tour, last year’s Cool Britannia-era British music-biz thriller Kill Your Friends got a low-key stateside release, and the '90s-set Channel 4 teen drama "My Mad Fat Diary" finally appeared on Hulu. What’s surprising about these works, though, is how many of them have managed to escape from nostalgia. For The Magic Whip, Blur departed England for a neon-lit Hong Kong travelogue. Having already made one respectable reunion album, on January’s Night Thoughts and its companion film, Brett Anderson applied Suede’s gutter-romantic lens to real adult life and particularly fatherhood, to exquisitely devastating effect. Lush’s dream-pop EP Blind Spot is a lovely, if tentative, first step back into the spotlight from a band that was too often underestimated in its tragically abbreviated first life.

"My Mad Fat Diary*"* performs an entirely different kind of magic. Originally aired between 2013 and 2015 on UK television, the series opens in 1996 and is steeped in cultural touchstones of teenage life during the Britpop years: the songs, the Gallagher-brothers haircuts, the “grunge is dead” t-shirts, the cars full of kids driving around trying to find the rave and then coming down from their first ecstasy pills on the trampled grass outside it the next morning. A show this tied to an era could err towards either bloodless historical reenactment or wanton nostalgia trip, and either approach would put distance between the viewer and the story. But "My Mad Fat Diary" has an emotional immediacy that’s rare for a TV series set in any period, and it comes from the specificity of the story it’s telling.

Based on author Rae Earl’s 2007 book My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary, an edited collection of real diary entries from the author’s youth that was published for the first time in America last month, the show follows a character of the same name. When we meet Rae (Sharon Rooney), she has just been released from the psychiatric hospital where she’s spent months recovering from a suicide attempt. “I’m 16, I weigh 16 and a half stone [231 pounds], and I live in Lincolnshire,” she writes in a diary whose entries double as the show’s narration. Rae also volunteers the information that she is “horny,” and loves music and food. In many senses, she’s a regular, working-class high schooler in a small town; it’s her weight and her mental illness that make her both an outcast at school and a type of character too rarely depicted on TV.

Though the real Rae dissected the Smiths and Madonna in the diary she wrote in the late '80s, the fictional Rae’s story takes on a special resonance when relocated to 1996, by which point Britpop would have become a fixture of provincial teenage life. The movement’s meaning changed over time; what began as an arch 1993 Select Magazine manifesto denouncing American grunge in favor of the “crimplene, glamour, wit and irony” of Suede, Pulp, Saint Etienne, Denim, and the Auteurs either evolved or devolved (depending on who you ask) into the macho spectacle of Oasis and Blur recreating the Beatles vs. Stones chart battles of the '60s. The constant was the idea that these bands were the guitar-wielding voices of young Britain. But as specific as albums like Pulp’s Different Class were to a generation that couldn’t remember life before Thatcherism, most of the songs put a working-class British filter on the more universal emotions of youth: loneliness, alienation, longing.

"My Mad Fat Diary’s" Rae, in her council-house bedroom with its walls covered in band posters, is the personification of these feelings. The classic sexually frustrated teenager in coming-of-age stories is an everyboy on a quest to get laid in a world where girls exist solely to deny sex or be coerced into it. Rae isn’t a female version of that character; she’s the character who almost always gets pushed to the margins of the story, the funny friend or the fat-girl punchline. It’s not just that obstacles stand in the way of satisfying her desires; it’s that she’s not supposed to have desires in the first place. And Rae knows this. Even within the co-ed clique her beautiful friend Chloe (Jodie Comer) introduces her to, she has to keep secrets about why she disappeared for months and which boys she thinks are “fit.”

What she’s really thinking about when she’s not good-naturedly pretending to be “one of the lads” or fighting with her single mom comes out in the journal entries and sessions with her therapist Kester (Ian Hart). But the most poetic representations of Rae’s emotional state are set to music. (It’s worth noting that the episodes on Hulu feature fewer songs than the British version, for licensing reasons. The American edit feels less saturated with music, but the tracks it retains preserve the show’s general atmosphere.) In the pilot, she spends an incandescent night with Chloe’s group, and their food fight in a chip shop is set to Suede’s “Beautiful Ones,” a song that mythologizes and undermines its gorgeous, fucked-up subjects in the same breath. Early in the next episode, Rae daydreams about unzipping her big body, stepping out of it as a sexy thin woman in lingerie, and then setting the head-to-toe fat suit on fire. It’s an arresting moment, but Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” makes it something more than that: a universal representation of the unbearable distance between any fantasy and its corresponding reality.

Music is what unites Rae with her new friends and love interests, too. They scrutinize each other’s jukebox selections at the pub and take road-trips to see Oasis (in matching Oasis T-shirts) and make lewd comments about Jarvis Cocker. When they sing the Verve’s “Lucky Man,” everyone knows the words.

Over three short seasons, "My Mad Fat Diary" begins to feel like a mixtape come to life, all those adolescent urges and frustrations and firsts—yes, in this story Rae gets her share—coalescing into a story whose mood can swing from ecstatic to despondent to panicked and back in the time it takes for one track to segue into the next. The show may well have older viewers recalling the first time they heard Manic Street Preachers’ “A Design for Life” or Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet,” but its emotional urgency demands that both the story and the songs are also experienced in the present tense.

“But it wasn’t like that,” says Rue Britannia’s hero, David Kohl, at one point in the comic, lamenting how the Retromancers have distorted the history of Britpop. “Oasis versus Blur and nowt all else. No miserablist shit like The Bends. No Prodigy crossing over. No proto-big-beat. No jungle. Even Pulp were barely there.” As the bands of that era reunite to make music that resists reliving the past, "My Mad Fat Diary" and its soundtrack restore all of the above nuance to the historical record. Blasting out of Rae Earl’s headphones, Britpop isn’t the retro music of the '90s—it’s the timeless music of adolescence.